Ancient Greece

Parthenon, Athens

For most of the ancient period, Greece was a small area on the border of more important states or empires like Egypt and Persia. While the West Asians were beginning to farm and keep sheep, the Greeks were still hunting and gathering. While the Egyptians were building the Pyramids, and the Sumerians were building ziggurats and inventing writing and math and astronomy, the Greeks were just beginning to take farming seriously. Like most people whose neighboring states are stronger and richer than they are, the Greeks soon began to make their living by working for their richer neighbors. Mostly Greek men worked as mercenary soldiers, but they also worked as artists and architects. Sometimes Greek men also raided their richer neighbors as pirates.

The Greeks learned many things from their richer neighbors - how to build palaces and temples, the alphabet, how to make big stone statues, how to build empires, and the Pythagorean theorem. The Greeks also had a lot in common with other Indo-European people: horses, sky gods, foot-races and wrestling, and salted ham. But while mixing these ideas, the Greeks also made their own contributions: sailing, the proportions of the Parthenon, the realism of Pheidias, the ideas of democracy and written history, and the idea of geometric proofs, all came from Greece itself.

As often happens with poorer neighbors, eventually the poorer Greeks took advantage of their neighbors' weakness to conquer them. First they conquered the areas near them: Ionia along the coast of what is now Turkey, the coast of the Black Sea, Thrace. Then the Greeks conquered to their west: Sicily and southern Italy, parts of the coastline of France and Spain. In the 300s BC, Alexander of Macedon and a Greek army finally conquered the Persian Empire, from Egypt to Afghanistan and Pakistan. For the next 200 years, the Greeks ruled most of West Asia. Greek ideas spread from Greece westward all over the Mediterranean Sea, eastward as far as northern India, and south into Upper Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia. But by 150 BC, the Roman army forced the Greeks into the Roman Empire, and Greece traded its independence for peace and prosperity.